


i want every line of you against every line of me

by BeautifullyLovely



Category: Mortal Instruments Series - Cassandra Clare
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-04
Updated: 2016-01-04
Packaged: 2018-05-11 19:53:04
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,092
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5639875
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BeautifullyLovely/pseuds/BeautifullyLovely
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Alec didn't like to talk about sex.</p>
            </blockquote>





	i want every line of you against every line of me

**Author's Note:**

> Warnings: References to Magnus' childhood.

“What do you want?” Magnus asked. He rested his body against Alec’s as if it were meant to be there, chest to chest. The words came out of his mouth easily, like they weren’t some huge revelation, but an obvious precedent for the events likely to occur. Alec was a little amazed.

Magnus traced the lines of his arms, the pads of his fingers leaving invisible bruises in their wake. Alec’s mind took a turn for the frantic. What should he say to such a question?

What did he want? He didn’t really know. What he wanted was something no one around him would think to approve of, which in turn made what he wanted into something he didn’t want.

Alec twitched, his thigh knocking Magnus’. It was a simple physical feeling: warmth, tingle, heat. It was the way that feeling twisted in his mind that ran him into trouble.

 _I don’t know._ He wanted to say, to brush any responsibility off his shoulders. _I don’t even know how I ended up here, in your bed, your arms, unclothed body against unclothed body. It must have been an accident. It must have been magic._

Of course, at the same time, he very much did not want to say this. It would make him appear even less experienced to Magnus, who Alec assumed had had hundreds of lovers over his lifetime. People Alec would rather pretend never existed.

He could say something explicit, if he wanted. _Touch me here, put your mouth there. I want to feel every line of your body against_ _every line of mine_. He could, but at the same time it felt like he couldn’t. Embarrassment? Fear? The possibility of trying to take something for himself became so much more complicated when it involved another person.

Magnus slid down a bit, resting his chin on Alec’s chest. His expression did something funny, his eyes turning kind even as his mouth turned wicked. “You know,” He said, pressing a hot kiss to Alec’s stomach. “It could be fun to experiment. Let me see what I can do.”

By the time Alec had come down, his body tired but his head spinning, Magnus knew a few tricks he should use and a few that he shouldn’t.

 

“Jace,” Alec said, his bow drawn. “Pay attention.”

Jace was fourteen, Alec a year and a half older. Each was still caught in that ever-awkward stage of adult and not-adult. Alec was discomforted almost always, his body a live-wire. It did not seem to help that all the boys at the institute wanted to talk about was sex.

“Sorry man,” Jace said. The look on his face was nowhere near approaching apologetic. “It’s just that she was fucking gorgeous. She had these breasts--” And Jace, being Jace, began a full-fledged soliloquy. “They were as plump as a ripened fruit.” He started, grinning as Alec, annoyed, shot off an arrow from his bow. “As round as the moon. As full as…”

“The moon again?” Alec asked. He did not often interrupt his siblings. If anything, it was the other way around, but this--Jace’s big-teethed grin, sharp and so incredibly unfamiliar as he talked about girls--made Alec’s skin inch.

Jace practiced a few lunging hits with his blade, and Alec’s eyes retreated firmly into safe spaces. “You know I have better wit than to use the same descriptor twice.” Jace said, his breath coming out in pants.

He smiled even as a sheen of sweat began to coat his temples, clearly thinking of whatshername and what he would like to do to her, and Alec felt an unhappy bubbling start to grow in his chest.

“Anyway, as I was saying, her breasts were the size of--”

“Can you not?” It came out angry, a thunder of lighting on a previously clean patch of grass. Jace blinked at him, taking in the aftershocks. “I’m sorry.” Alec said, immediately wanting to take it away, swallow up whatever had come out back down into his stomach until it no longer existed.

Jace eyed him a bit longer, his laughing eyes turning contemplative. Alec couldn’t have that, the look, couldn’t deal with whatever Jace was trying to put together like building blocks inside his mind.

“It’s nothing.” Alec said. “I just don’t want to talk about girls when we have training to do.”

“Alright,” Jace agreed, easy as he never was.

Years later, Alec thought back to the moment, and believed that that’s probably when Jace figured it out.

 

Alec didn't like the word gay, at first. He figured that liking boys was problem enough.

He had other things to think about, anyway. Jace, Izzy, Max, his parents, training--there were a multitude of other people and activities and problems to deal with that mattered more. The occasional time when he was alone with himself and his desires ceased to matter. It was when he was with his parabatai that he was whole.

Alec put a cover over his eyes, a shield over his heart. Beautiful men didn’t matter in the long run, family and career did.

Most of the time it wasn’t a big deal, he could endure it without too much pain. It only became hard when the people he considered precious to him did not follow the same principle.

“Her name’s Clary.” Jace said, indicating the scrappy redhead.

It was something like hate at first sight.

Part of it was the way Alec wanted the looks Jace gave her to be directed at him. Part of it was that she was an outsider, likely to give more trouble than help. Most of it was the fact that she was a catalyst. Alec knew, just looking at her, at the way his siblings turned to her with interest, that their lives were about to change.

Like dominos, she came at them. It started with Jace, as it almost always did.

 

Magnus Bane was sex. He stained his lips and nails with color, etched his lids in shimmering rings. He looked at them with a calculating eye, as if they were there for trouble, when he was the one who could twist minds with a flick of his fingertips.

He was glamor and glitter and all kinds of wrong. A downworlder with a smirk on his lips. A man who looked at other men without a stitch of shame. His demon mark was his eyes, a blatantly obvious place for a warlock to bear the scars of his father. When he smiled, his teeth were a flash of silver light, and it was impossible not to lean just that little bit closer.

He was, in essence, everything Alexander Lightwood had been made to avoid.

 

Which was why it didn’t make sense that Alec had chosen to sit on his couch, watching Magnus through swift upward glances, as Magnus himself lounged without a care on the seat next to him, his cat in his lap.

Magnus lifted a hand from Chairman Meow’s fur to place it under his chin. He looked puzzled, but intrigued. At least, Alec hoped he was intrigued. “Are you sure you want a date with me?” He asked, his voice soft but firm. “I am rather fabulous, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that I am your type.”

His stare was penetrating, a shocking gold with flecks of green. Alec was told all his life about the hideousness of demon marks, the way they made a body seemingly perfectly well-made into a minor monstrosity. It felt wrong though, to look at Magnus and think him anything but beautiful, which he very clearly was.

Alec swallowed, and Magnus’ eyes shined. It was this, this right here that made Alec walk the trembling half-steps up Magnus’ walkway and ask to be let inside, this that made him blurt out the question that had been stomping around for a way past his teeth ever since Magnus had opened his door.

Magnus looked at him with desire. It was clear in his eyes, the way they followed Alec’s shoulders as he shifted, how they traced the seams of his lips with what appeared to be infinite care. Alec himself had never felt this look before. It was a new and foreign thing, but somehow he understood it, as if it were a skill lying in wait for the chance to be stretched out for the first time. Something semi-intuitive, like a long-forgotten reflex.

Alec felt that stare, liked it, and wanted more. Knew it was reflected in his own eyes as he took in the image of the warlock in front of him.

“I like you.” He said, and it was the truest thing he had said in a long time.

 

Their first date was something of a disaster. Alec spent most of it thinking Magnus must be regretting ever locking eyes with him in the first place. Each time he tried to open his mouth, words fell like sledgehammers from his lips. He felt as if he must have been becoming less attractive by the minute.

It was a surprise when Magnus, his smile a shocking mix of wry and tentative, looked to him and said: “I was sure you were having an awful time yourself.”

It was strange. A part of Alec had placed Magnus into a category different from himself, and not just because he was a shadowhunter and Magnus was a warlock. The first thing he had noticed about Magnus was his confidence, the way it seemed to bleed through him in excess.

He had not taken into account that he, a boy of seventeen, a shadowhunter who could move with grace when his strings were pulled and stand awkwardly silent when left to his own devices, could in any way have such an effect on the being in front of him. It chagrined him. It worried him.

It thrilled him to the core.

 

Their first kiss, a week before, was a dizzying experience. This was very much the same, except for one key element: intent.

Magnus gasped against his cheek, his fingers tight on the sides of Alec’s hips as he was pressed into the wall.

“I want--” Alec started, his breath a rush. He shivered as Magnus skimmed the line between shirt and skin. He didn’t know what to add. I want everything. I want nothing. I want anything you would be willing to give me.

He couldn’t stand by and let Magnus kiss him as he had the first time, he needed to crush back against him, savor the moment. When would he have the ability to have this again?

They fell against the plushness of Magnus’ couch, Alec on top, and he searched with his hands and lips for every piece of rare skin, want thrumming through him.

Magnus lifted his hips, wrapping his legs tight against the lines of Alec’s waist. He was terrifying, the way he could trap Alec without lifting a hand. Or, Alec thought, maybe he was terrified at himself, at the way he wanted to be trapped.

He kissed Magnus’ palm when it was offered, unable to stop, ready to dive into the pool even if he broke every bone on the way down.

“Alec,” Magnus whispered. Alec looked up into Magnus’ eyes, and the emotion in them was too complex for him to understand. “Maybe we should pause for a second.” Magnus nudged him with a hand to his shoulder, and Alec felt the rejection spear deep.

He immediately ripped his body away, going to stand across the room where everything was a little easier to comprehend and much more safer besides.

“Are you kicking me out?” It sounded whiny to his own ears, childish. He wouldn’t blame Magnus if he was.

Magnus pursed his lips before speaking. When he did, his words were careful. You can stay if you want, he said. You can stay, or you can go, but you need to stop and think.

Alec came back to himself, and realized he was trembling. He paced the room--Magnus’ room, with it’s unfamiliar color and strange furniture and unexpectedly desirable couch--trying to gain control over his limbs.

What did he want? It was hard to say, he had spent so long avoiding it.

Magnus watched him in the half-dark, his eyes bright and thoughtful. Again Alec was reminded of just who he was here with--a warlock, a demon’s son, a surprisingly kind man who could nonetheless turn to stone if the situation called for it.

He did not, in that moment, want to take everything and burn it to the ground, not if he would be burning Magnus along with it.

“I should go.” He said, his hand to the door, and Magnus smiled a wistful smile.

“Probably.” He said it like he was sad about it, that he couldn’t take Alec to bed right then and there, that they couldn’t wrap themselves up together until one couldn’t be distinguished from the other.

Alec kissed him for it, kissed him until their taste was permanently left onto each other's tongues.

“Can I see you again?” He asked, his heart in his throat. Magnus was left on the floor from where their kisses had taken them. His shirt, previously a smooth-pressed silk, was creased in every direction. His hair, earlier a perfect sweep of black and blue lining his brow, had become a temporary birdnest. His lips were an unnatural red from Alec’s, and the skin around them was blotchy and flushed when he smiled a very small smile at Alec’s question.

“All right.” He said, after a few moments. “I suppose that could work.”

Alec was high from the kiss, and he didn’t notice the stairs on his way out, his knees knocking the wall and his hands scraping at the landing. He ignored the throbbing hurt of the tumble, too focused on the mark Magnus had placed between neck and shoulder.

 

During the awkward stage of adult and not-adult, his father had pulled him aside on an average mid-morning day in June. “Alec,” Robert said. “I want to talk to you about something.”

Alec was immediately suspicious. He tried to not let it show, but he was never very good at controlling his emotions. They always seemed to find a way to his face one way or another.

Robert coughed, sitting on the corner of Alec’s bed. Alec waited. It wasn’t often he had one-on-one conversations with his father. Robert was always looking after Jace whenever the family was all together. Alec secretly thought that Jace was his father’s favorite, but he never said anything, taking it into his chest and accepting it. Jace was, he agreed, someone worthy of being a favorite.

“You’re older now, old enough for this conversation. In fact, it’s probably overdue.” His father grimaced, like this was an un-favored duty that he wished he could pass on to someone else.

“Dad,” Alec said, pretty sure he knew what this was about. “We don’t have to--”

“But we do.” Robert patted the mattress next to him. “Come sit by me.” Alec reluctantly did.

There was something incredibly uncomfortable about talking sex with a parent. Alec knew, theoretically, that most people had sex and considered it natural, but it wasn’t something mentioned in polite conversation.

Condoms in case of STDs, Robert said. Condoms in case of pregnancy. Think of the (possible) children.

He ended on another cough. “Well, do you have any questions for me?” He asked, clearly hoping for an answer along the lines of no. Alec told him such.

Robert patted his shoulder, and, despite the painfully stilted conversation, the contact held a knot of affection. “You’re a good man, Alec.” Robert said, and Alec warmed at the words. “You’ll find a beautiful wife one day. Someone you can spend the rest of your life with.”

And his father left, not knowing that the words he had said were the equivalent of a metaphorical death sentence.

 

Alec thought of that conversation in Paris, when Magnus reached out to fix the collar of his shirt. He had reflexively pulled back, the gesture public. Magnus smiled after, but Alec, who had grown used to spending time with him and had grown fond of learning the expressions of his face, had seen the quickly disguised burst of annoyance followed by pain before it was washed away.

Jace and Izzy wouldn’t understand. They flaunted their lovers with smiles on their faces, kissed them out in the open where people took the gesture as one of love, not defiance. When Robert had looked at him, pride in his eyes as he took in the growth of his eldest boy, he hadn’t even considered the possibility of him marrying a man.

Sex had to be political for Alec, because that was the way of things.

Alec looked at Magnus, his long purple fur coat and his silver edged fingernails, and knew him to be a man who didn’t compromise on himself. Unless, Alec supposed, watching his empty hand curl around air, it came to the people he cared for.

Alec swallowed, and without words slipped his hand into the warmth of Magnus’ hand.

“You don’t have to.” Magnus told him, without looking him in the face, and Alec thought he might understand better than most.

“I don’t care.” Alec said, tightening his fingers. He was proud to call this man his own.

 

They had sex that night, the wind blowing in from a half-open window, the lights of the city dazzling against the bedspread.

“Are you alright?” Magnus asked, as they moved slowly against each other.

Yes, Alec replied. He replied with his voice, and his mouth, and his hands. He said yes with every indrawn breath and every exhale, and he said yes when he curled himself over Magnus and let go.

 

“Is it alright?” Alec asked, slipping his fingers under the rope and tugging, making sure it was tight but wouldn’t leave bruises.

Magnus smiled at him over his shoulder, moving his body in a sensuous wave to test the rope around it. “It will do.” He said. Alec knew many sarcastic people, but Magnus proved to be a special sort of cheeky when he wanted.

Alec kissed at his skin, a soft press of lips. He felt the need to be careful with this, with Magnus when he was like this. Magnus leaned his head back against Alec’s shoulder, baring his throat, which Alec nosed delicately across.

Alec had just started to feel he got the hang of sex, what it was, the mechanics, when Magnus had turned to him one day and made a suggestive joke about being being tied up. Alec could barely remember what caused it, too focused on the idea of Magnus’ skin lined with criss-crossed marks. Magnus, seeing this as he saw almost everything, had lifted a brow in contemplation.

Which led to this: Alec at Magnus’ back, tying perfect lines of rope from neck to spine over his lover’s body. Alec had always seen such acts as other, something people who weren’t normal took up, but Alec himself wasn’t normal under shadowhunter society. Whether it was true or not, doing the act with Magnus, who had smiled at him when his fingers had tripped and laughed with him as they fumbled, trying to find the best position, made it seem as comfortable as anything else they did together.

Magnus, Alec had figured out, wasn’t someone who was used to being looked after. When they first met, this made sense. Who, after all, would be the person to look after one of the most powerful and oldest warlocks of New York? Who would believe he even needed it?

“What are you doing?” Magnus murmured, his back arching. Alec traced a soft line down the rope with his lips, kissing the places it pulled tight.

“I’m taking my time.” Alec answered, confident as he was only when looking after those he cared about.

Magnus was no longer an idea in his mind, a body he could lean against and pour all of his doubts and anger into. A pair of lips to kiss or an ear to reveal those secrets tightly held in because they would bring out disappointment in anyone else. He was now, simply, Magnus, a warlock with years upon years of experience and pain who could still feel the flutter of breath being taken away despite it.

 

There would be a time in the future, when Magnus came back from his father’s realm with hardness in his eyes and black and blue coloring across his wrists, where Alec would not tie knots around Magnus’ body with careful fingers out of respect.

Alec never mentioned the rope after that, only wanting to kiss any marks away, until Magnus presented him with it weeks later, his eyes daring Alec to say anything. It was still a fragile position they were in, carefully piecing themselves together, but it was a position both were adamant about making strong.

Alec took the rope with kind hands, looping it through with precise motions as Magnus closed his tired eyes. It was as easy as breathing, to coast against Magnus’ body with his own. Magnus trembled, laughing as Alec ghosted a ticklish kiss against his spine, and Alec laughed with him.

It would be alright, he thought, his hands tracing the lines the rope cut into Magnus’ skin.

Magnus grinned at Alec as he untied him. “You know,” He said, nodding his head in the direction of Alec's hoodie, which had found its place onto Magnus’ floor. “I always thought that it was hilarious that you picked black rope. I wonder if together we can turn it gray.” Alec smacked him lightly on the hip, even as he buried a smile into Magnus’ neck. Yes, yes it would be alright.

 

Magnus was looking at him with _that_ look. The look that said: “I love you; I want you; I’m going to take you home and ravish you completely.” Alec had decades to get used to that look, yet he still felt his face flush and his hands tremble around the stem of his glass.

Magnus lifted his own glass to his ruby-stained lips, swallowing the last of his wine. He only drank excessively when he was either terribly sad or terribly happy, and by the smile he shot Alec it was easy to guess which one he felt tonight.

Max had left for Europe the day before on business, a speaker for downworlder-shadowhunter relations in the modern era, and Alec and Magnus were left with an empty house after the party Magnus had thrown yesterday, streamers still caught in the family room lampshades.

It was sad, as it always was to see a child leave you for other things, yet Alec was not alone. He reached for Magnus’ hand across the table, where Magnus met him, easy as anything. He knew by the look in Magnus’ eyes that he had plans for the empty house. Alec was glad to go along with them, to interweave them with his own.

“Magnus?” Alec asked, confused. Magnus’ smile had twitched for a moment, before righting itself once again. He nodded at a table behind Alec’s shoulders.

Alec checked the table with a quick glance, too quick for the mundanes eyeing them to catch it. It was a man and a women, young, clearly out on a date by the way they leaned into each other. They were looking at Magnus’ smooth, brown hand on Alec’s, an old and weathered thing, full of battle scars and life-giving wrinkles.

The man’s eyes went from their intertwined hands to Magnus, who was dressed in an expensively cut suit carved out with intricate spirals. His ears were pierced, the jewels in them seemingly diamonds, though Alec knew them to be fakes.

“What does it matter?” Magnus had said to him, once. “If the fake looks as good as the real, then why is the fake priced so much lower?”

The man coughed, the woman’s lips a disgusted straight line.

“Looks like they think you’re my sugar-daddy.” Magnus said, his pinky finger pointing to the couple. He gave Alec the second to stop him, if he wanted. Alec didn’t want to stop him.

“I take offense to that statement.” Magnus said, his voice carrying over to the young pair. They each looked up, a dash of heat to their cheeks due to their previous ogling.

The man, clearly not sure what to make of Magnus, who had started talking at him with no prompting, sat for a moment in puzzled disorder. Alec almost felt bad. He had the same reaction to his husband when they had met years before. The man coughed, finally boosted up by courage and the woman hitting him on the arm in an attempt to knock him out of his stuttering.

“I--don’t think we said anything?” The man said. It was shaped like a question, even though his silence was already clear.

“No,” Magnus said, turning his body, his legs crossed at the knee. He placed his arm on the table as a prop for his chin. “No, it wasn’t what you said, so much as what you weren’t saying.”

The woman’s brow creased in confusion. “What?”

“Your looks implied that this man had bought me my fantastic suit.” He gestured to himself with painted fingers, wiping his hand across one of his lapels. “While it is true that this suit is fantastic, I’m afraid that out of the two of us, I am the one with the larger salary.”

Alec pulled up short. He shot Magnus a withering glare, who just grinned at him. He had long made fun of the little salary shadowhunters earned for risking their lives on a daily basis, yet the jokes always held an edge of real anger when it came to Alec and his well-being during his earlier years on active duty, so Alec usually let him get away with it. This was a particularly bad time to call attention to it, though, and Alec would be after him about it later.

“OK?” The woman said, staring at Magnus’ spiked hair. She could probably put an eye out on one of those end pieces.

Magnus leaned over to kiss Alec on the cheek, a soft peck. It was undeniably clear what the kiss signified: I am having sex with this man, and it is a privilege to do so.

The couples’ faces blanched.

 

“Was that really necessary?” Alec asked, his arm hooked around one of Magnus’. His stern and elder face usually made him appear to the be the adult in their relationship, no pun intended, to Magnus’ impish grin and sparkling eyes. He was doing a pretty terrible job of filling that stereotype at the moment, being bowled over with giggles just as much as Magnus was.

Magnus gave him one of those impish grins. Alec's mind took a temporary detour. Damn, but his husband was radiant.

Magnus, his body clumsy from too much wine, wrapped himself around Alec. He couldn't escape if he wanted to, not that he wanted to.

“If other people don't appreciate my silver fox of a husband, that's their problem.” He slurred against Alec's ear.

They giggled, giggled until Magnus took a near plunge into a close by dumpster, saved only by Alec's quick reflexes. Then they just outright laughed.

“This is so embarrassing.” Alec said, grinning.

Magnus flapped a hand, pulling himself to his feet. He managed the action with a great deal of grace, of which Alec was impressed.

“Please,” Magnus scoffed. He patted Alec’s chest. “I keep you young at heart.” Then he patted Alec’s hip, where his stamina rune lay. “And this keeps you young in body.”

Alec scowled at him, then kissed Magnus for all he was worth.

If there were people watching, he didn't notice them.

 

It was difficult, the first few weeks together again, after everything, after hell and back. It wasn’t that they didn’t fit, so much as the shock that they still did, maybe more so than they had before.

Sex was different than it was before, too. Shy presses of lips, stilted touches. As if they knew now what they wanted, and were determined to be as careful as possible handling it. Yet time kept flowing, and slowly they learned not to treat each other as delicate jewels, but instead the equivalent of a well-loved book, the battered and ripped seams only indicating that life had touched them and they had felt it.

Alec pressed against Magnus in the dark, and with each press he further wrote himself into Magnus’ skin. Magnus was no longer the mysterious being who looked at him across a crowded room. He had more to him than that, had lived longer than Alec and in that time had experienced massive heartbreak. Heartbreak so strong, no mere mortal could comprehend it. Still, Alec would try.

“I want you.” He said, his lips to Magnus’ lips. I want you when you’re sad, and when you’re angry. I want you when you stand on top of the world and when you’re lying broken on the ground. And he kissed him to show this commitment, and for the first time Magnus let him.

He let him brush against the skin around his eyes, long since removed from the bluish coloring his step-father had put there after his mother was found hanging from the rafters in their barn. He let him kiss the faded lines on his wrists, from when he was younger, the church promising him that if he only withstood it a little longer, if only he was stronger, then the demon would be bled out. He let him skim fingers across the scar at the back of his knee, where an arrow clipped him as a child, the shadowhunter chasing him through the forest pausing long enough for Magnus to make his escape. He let him in, until he was certain he could not get him out, his future death already a prick against the heart.

“Tell me about your past lovers.” Alec whispered in the dark, wanting to know even as jealousy churned throughout his body, because they were a part of Magnus, they had touched him, and Alec wanted to know every single mark on Magnus’ skin.

And Magnus told him, even as it opened old wounds long thought healed, because he knew Alec would be there to stitch him back towards whole.


End file.
